Literature Memoir

Briana Lanza

Tasha Thomas

September 2012

                                                                Do I Really Need Them?

                Do you remember making friends in the first grade? If you ever moved to you remember having to make all new friends, did you keep in touch with those friends? I feel like moving never changes. One thing that always stays the same about packing its time consuming and always rushed. So no matter how premeditated the move is you always lose a friend, in most cases when your younger its because of miscontact and you forget about them. But I was 17 years 10 months and 28 days old when I moved. So whos fault is it now that me and my friends all lost contact, it took me just about until I came here to get over it.

                This didn’t start right after I moved it started literally right after graduation, I went out to dinner with them all that night and have not seen one since. Now I thought this was pretty messed up because after all they were supposed to be my friends and we had all talked about keeping in touch but summer came and the time began to wind down until I left and I still got no phone calls, no texting. Nothing. I wasn’t one of those girls that was close with a million people I was friendly with most, but I only had a couple “true” friends, I could count them on my hand. So maybe cause I had a small group of friends it was my fault I should have been more friendly, I remember telling myself this my last week in new York. Was it my fault that not one of my friends wrote me? Or was I at fault because I didn’t really make the effort either? So maybe its mutual thing, I knew that conversations went two ways but I let my pride hold me back too much. I wouldn’t allow myself to beg for people to talk to me, this had happen to me before I had lost friends but to lose them all to go to a place you don’t know is really scary and I didn’t know what to do. So I cried and I thought about all the good times that I had with my friend. I felt like I was going through that first break up, my heart was crushed but the people that I would have ran to in that situation was not there for me. I literally felt alone in that month, within the month before school and moving here I got sick and had myself stressed to no end.

                After getting sick I just gave up, I didn’t care that my friends were gone because after the week of sitting in bed I figured out that I didn’t really need people who didn’t need me. I was going to meet and greet with a plethora of people at school. I learned my lesson. People will come and go but there will always be more people. So I started to find friends from upstate through twitter, I befriended my roommate and many more people. A couple of my old friends eventually wrote me saying that they missed me but it just made me think how much could you possibly miss someone if you didn’t even put in the effort to see them when they are leaving for ever.

                I don’t think my friends noticed that I am gone for a very long time. I have no family left in new York so I won’t really have a reason to go back. Its not like I just went away to college, I moved away for college. So maybe my friends saw it as me just going to school in another place and I would be back home, but now im home in south Carolina. New York is not where I was going back to. But maybe I didn’t need them after all, maybe I will be okay without them. I mean I already have new friends back but starting over isn’t that much fun, so every once in a while I wish I still kept in contact with the people that knew me better than anyone else. But yet again I don’t need them.